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How the rise of TETRIS became an unlikely Cold War battle

Car chases. KGB honeytraps. A furious Robert Maxwell. Not the plot of a thriller, but the astonishing tale of the best-selling game ever...

By Brian Viner

Afast-paced cold War thriller featuring sinister KGB agents, Muscovite boffins, powerful U.s. capitalists and a raging British media tycoon. It all sounds like the plot of a computer game. In fact, it is — the astonishing tale of tetris. etris.

Millions of us have played tetris. ris. It is the simple but beguiling game me of falling bricks of varied shapes, which have to be speedily rearranged ed to form a solid wall.

It’s utterly addictive and remains ains a commercial phenomenon, easily ly the best- selling video game of all time with more than half a billion downloads downect on mobile devices alone.

tetris has even been the subject of scientific studies, one of which found that playing the game can help fight off cravings for food and even drugs. While its 1990s heyday has passed, ssed, when people dream or hallucinate inate about the games they play on screens, it is still known as ‘the tetris effect’.

But hardly anyone who has played tetris knows that, after being conceived in 1984 by an obscure computer scientist in Moscow, it was fiercely fought over by the world’s biggest video- game companies, media mogul Robert Maxwell and the KGB in a tangle of corporate chicanery, greed and ineptitude.

a new film, tetris, starring British actor taron egerton, best known for playing elton John in Rocketman, brings the complex saga vividly to life. there are car chases, violent assaults, KGB ‘honeypot’ traps, and an enraged Maxwell ( brilliantly played by Roger allam).

the tycoon was so desperate to obtain the lucrative rights to the game — which he hoped would help to rescue his ailing empire — that he threatened to appeal personally to soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

the film, out this friday on streaming service apple tV+, tells the story of the tetris inventor alexey pajitnov, who named the game after the Greek word for four, tetra, combined with his favourite sport, tennis.

Bythe early 1980s, pajitnov was working in the cramped computer centre of the Russian academy of sciences in Moscow. But in the evenings he found time to work on games, one of which was inspired by ‘pentominoes’, a puzzle he had loved as a child. his stroke of genius was to get the pieces to drop from above, then make the completed rows vanish to make room for more bricks. tetris was born.

By 1986, it had become an obsession across the soviet Union. ‘It was like a wood fire,’ pajitnov later recalled. While the cost of computers put them beyond the reach of most households, ‘everyone in the soviet Union who had a pc had tetris on it’.

But its success was largely unknown in the West. It was in Budapest that London-based software salesman Robert stein (played by toby Jones) first set eyes on the game.

Recognising its potential, stein telexed pajitnov and asked if he could buy the pc rights for £10,000, unaware that in a communist regime ( where all intellectual property was owned by the state) they were not pajitnov’s to sell.

When pajitnov telexed back that he would be happy to talk, stein wrongly took it to mean the tetris rights were his. It didn’t stop him selling them on to Mirrorsoft, the software arm of Maxwell’s vast (but already crumbling) publishing empire, which in turn sub-licensed them to atari, the american video-games giant.

that might have been that, were an even mightier giant not waiting to pounce. In 1988, a charismatic but down- on- his- luck dutch entrepreneur henk Rogers (wonderfully played by egerton) spotted tetris at a Las Vegas trade show.

he snapped up the pc and video-game rights for Japan and joined forces with Kyotobased Nintendo, persuading the top brass that being able to play tetris on the Game Boy would make their intoxicating new product an even bigger hit.

the situation was by now chaotic: atari thought tetris was theirs, Maxwell believed it was his and Nintendo wanted it. the fixation helped the Russians realise its value. aware communism was on the verge of collapse, they saw an opportunity to play the ‘greedy’ capitalists at their own game by selling different rights to different buyers.

this job was handed to Nikolai Belikov, new to government agency elorg, responsible for the import and export of software. Belikov arranged a meeting with stein, while Maxwell dispatched his son Kevin to Moscow.

Rogers checked into a hotel overlooking Red square, also intending to see Belikov.

this was when the KGB leapt into action, bugging rooms and telephones to find out what the Westerners’ intentions were and planting one of its own operatives as Rogers’s sexy interpreter.

In the excellent forthcoming film, directed by scotsman Jon Baird (with Glasgow and aberdeen convincingly doubling as 1980s Moscow), she even sets up a blackmail sting by attempting to seduce him.

that was a flourish of artistic licence, licence but in real life as in the movie, stein, Rogers and Kevin Maxwell coincidentally converged on elorg elorg’s s office on the same day.

Belikov knew the they mustn’t meet. Rogers was effectiv effectively interrogated for two hours. ‘I thought tho they were trying to figure out ou whether they were going to send me to siberia or not,’ he later rec recalled.

In the event, it was w Rogers and Nintendo who emerged em with the main prize: the ‘conn console and handheld’ held’ rights to tetris, tetrri in exchange for $500,000 and a 50-cent 5 royalty for every game sold. soldd

WheNheN Robert Rob Maxwell found out his son had lost out o on the coveted hand-held hannd- rights, he was apoplectic. he h thre threatened to contact tact Gorbachhev Gorbachev personally, per which put the windd up eve even the KGB.

the soviet Union was still intact, just about, and an its premier wielded enormous po power. the KGB didn’t want him turning tur on them.

so they told to Belikov he should fly to London, Londo get down on his knees before Maxwell — and beg him not to talk to the soviet leader. Because Becau if that happened, Belikov was told menacingly, he ‘would no longer lon exist’.

the atari executives ex were already manufacturing manufactur the game under their agreement agreem with Mirrorsoft, but it was ar arch-rival Nintendo’s to sell, not theirs. theirs atari sued Nintendo, and in 1989 c conclusively lost. the game was w up. Infamously, on November 5, 1991, Robert Maxwell’s Maxw body was found floating in the th atlantic Ocean.

Nobody knows kno whether it was suicide, cide, murder or an accident, only that to keep h his beleaguered empire above water he had looted hundreds dreds of millions mil of pounds from his employees’ employee pension fund.

as for th the game’s inventor, alexey pajitnov, pajitn he became close friends with henk Rogers, who, in that same e eventful year of 1991, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, helped him to move with his family to the United states.

In 1996, pajitnov p and Rogers founded the tetris company, to handle licensing. licen and in 2005 the tetris comp company bought elorg, by then a private priva rather than stateowned d company, giving it control of all tetris rights worldwide.

It was the collapse of the communist eastern Bloc that enabled all that to happen, meaning that pajitnov (now thought to be worth £4 million) could finally receive royalties for the game he had created.

this is why the original film title, replaced by the more straightforward tetris, carried an ingenious double meaning: falling Blocs.

TeTris is in selected cinemas and on Apple TV+ from March 31.

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